World War II in the Eastern Mediterranean and Balkans. You will find a wide range of political and social views in these articles. This website does not support any 'isms or 'ists! It is solely for educational purposes.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Australian troops just before they advance into
French-mandated Syria in collaboration with Free French forces, 10 July 1941.

In 1936 French Premier Léon Blum promised
Syria its independence, but his government fell before the decision could be
carried out. After the defeat France in FALL GELB in May–June 1940, Syrian
mandate authorities and the local Foreign Legion garrison sided with the Vichy
governor, Henri Dentz, against the Free French. Syria became a battleground
when Free French, British, Australian, and Indian Army forces—some shipped
north from East Africa—invaded on June 8, 1941. After five weeks of fighting
that required British reinforcement from North Africa, Dentz agreed to an
armistice on July 4. Charles de Gaulle was enraged to learn the surrender of
Syria and the Levant was made to the British rather than to his delegate. The
dispute nearly led to a breach between “Fighting France” and Winston Churchill.
A compromise was reached in which de Gaulle agreed that the Middle East theater
of operations was a special case: liberated territories of the French Empire in
the Middle East would be administered by the British, whose pressing and wide
security interests required direct authority. Suspicions about London’s
intentions for the rest of the French Empire were allayed after British forces
liberated Madagascar and handed the island to de Gaulle. After the war, the French
sought to return to the status quo antebellum in Syria, fighting to repress
local nationalists and Ba’athists until April 1946. Then they withdrew and
Syria became independent.

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Syria was then turned over to the Free
French authorities. The French recognized Syria’s independence but continued to
occupy the country, which was used as an Allied base for the rest of the war.
Free French Commander General Georges Catroux became Syria’s Delegate-General
and Plenipotentiary. French authorities declared martial law, imposed strict
press censorship, and arrested political subversives.

In July 1943, following pressure from Great
Britain, France announced new elections. A nationalist government came to power
that August, electing as president Syrian nationalist Shukri al-Quwwatti, one
of the leaders of the 1925–1927 uprising against the French. France granted
Syria independence on 1 January 1944, but the country remained under
Anglo-French occupation for the remainder of the war. In January 1945, the
Syrian government announced the formation of a national army, and in February
it declared war on the Axis powers.

Syria became a charter member of United
Nations in March 1945. In early May 1945, anti-French demonstrations erupted
throughout Syria, whereon French forces bombarded Damascus, killing 400
Syrians. British forces then intervened. A United Nations resolution in
February 1946 called on France to evacuate the country, and by 15 April, all
French and British forces were off Syrian soil. Evacuation Day, 17 April, is
still celebrated as a Syrian national holiday.

Arab Soldiers in the Arab Army during the Arab Revolt of 1916–1918. The
Arabs are carrying the Arab Flag of the Arab Revolt and pictured in the Arabian
Desert.

Prior to World War I (1914–1918), secular nationalism in the
Middle East was largely confined to military and administrative elites with
Western educations. In the Islamic and multiethnic Ottoman Empire, such elites
established Turkish and Arab cultural associations and secret nationalist
societies after the constitutional revolutions of 1908 and 1909. Of the Middle
Eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, only in Egypt did nationalism emerge
as something approaching a popular movement before World War I. The country had
become almost independent under a dynasty of governors established by the
ethnic Albanian, Mehmet Ali (1770–1849).

By the end of the 1870s, bureaucrats, journalists, military
officers, and landowners had begun to protest intensive political and economic
intervention in Egyptian affairs by European powers. The protests were
expressed in terms of Ottoman and Islamic identity as well as Egyptian
territorial nationalism. A broadly based movement against European intervention
and for constitutional government coalesced around Ahmad ‘Urābī
(1839–1911), a military officer and minister of war. In 1882 a British invasion
force suppressed his movement and thus began the occupation of the country.
Until after World War I, the Egyptian independence movement remained primarily
one of Western-oriented landowners, journalists, and lawyers, exemplified by
Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908) and his National Party.

World War I brought the destruction of the Ottoman Empire.
Soon after, ethnic Turks in Anatolia fought a two-year war of independence
against Greek and Allied invaders. The leader of the independence movement,
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), along with other former Ottoman officers
and officials, established the Turkish Republic in 1923 in the reconquered
areas. The new state’s ideology, known as Kemalism, emphasized secularism,
Turkish nationalism, and republicanism as the basis of political identity.
These ideas were inculcated with remarkable rapidity through the school system
and the conscript army.

Egyptians resumed their struggle against British control
after World War I with a popular revolt in 1919. The country gradually gained
independence through a series of treaties signed with Great Britain in 1922,
1936, and 1954. The most influential party in this period was the secular,
nationalist Wafd (Delegation) Party, led first by Sa’d Zaghlūl,
(1857–1927), another landowning lawyer. The Wafd’s influence peaked in the
1930s, while in the same period the Muslim Brotherhood emerged as a popular
movement and a critic of the secularism of the Egyptian elite.

Egyptian nationalism was initially distinct from Arab
nationalism, which became predominant in the Arab Levant and Fertile Crescent
after World War I. During the war, in 1916, Sharif Husayn (1835–1931) of Mecca
had launched a British-supported Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire.
Although some members of the prewar secret Arab nationalist societies joined
his revolt, most of his followers were motivated by tribal loyalties and
British subsidies, rather than by nationalist ideals. Following the war, the
Arab Levant and Fertile Crescent were divided into four League of Nations
mandates. These were Iraq, Syria (including Lebanon), Palestine, and
Transjordan, each of which was promised eventual independence as a
nation-state. Iraq, established as a monarchy under British supervision, gained
independence in 1932. Iraqi Arab nationalism, with strong overtones of Pan-Arab
nationalism, was inculcated through the newly established school system, youth
organizations, and the conscript army. Army officers in particular resented
continued British influence in Iraqi affairs. The mandate for Syria, under
French tutelage, was constituted as two republics, Syria and Lebanon, both of
which gained independence in 1946.

After an anti-French revolt lasting from 1925 to 1927,
leading Syrian politicians formed the National Bloc as the principal
association working for independence. The Bloc’s supporters spread Syrian Arab
and Pan-Arab nationalism through the school system, Boy Scout troops, and
athletic clubs. Syrian and Pan-Arab nationalism expanded similarly in Lebanon,
but they competed with a specifically Lebanese nationalism that was strong
especially among Maronite Christians, who were traditionally close to the French.
The most significant political party expressing Lebanese nationalism was the
Phalange, established in 1936 by Pierre Gemayel (1905–1984).

Palestine, under British control, also saw the spread of
Arab nationalism in much the same manner as Syria. However, the Zionist
movement, benefiting by British protection, made the quest for Palestinian
independence even more difficult. By 1935, five Arab nationalist political
parties had been established in the country, though some had no popular
followings. Palestinians launched an uprising against Great Britain and the
Zionists in 1936, which the British put down by 1939.

The Arab world in the 1940s experienced the intensification
of Pan-Arab nationalism. This was true even in Egypt, where the League of Arab
States was headquartered after its creation in 1945. Widespread support in the
Arab world for the struggle of the Palestinian Arabs against Zionist
colonization further magnified Pan-Arab sentiments, although allied Arab armies
were defeated by the new state of Israel in the 1948 Palestine War.

Outside of the former Ottoman Empire, Iran also experienced
secular nationalism after World War I. There, as in Turkey, the emergence of
secular nationalism was a state-led development. In 1926, the army’s commander
in chief, Reza Khan (1878–1944), brought an end to the ruling Qajar dynasty and
established himself as shah, taking the name of Pahlavi for his dynasty. Modeling
his program on that of Atatürk, Reza Shah strove to inculcate in
the Iranian people a secular Persian identity drawing on Iran’s pre-Islamic
traditions.

With considerably less success than Atatürk,
Reza Shah advanced these ideas especially through a new secular school system
and the military, and he created a secular legal system intended to replace
Islamic courts. He abdicated and was replaced by his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
(1919–1980), in 1941, early in the British- Soviet occupation of the country.
In the same year, the Iran Party was formed as a secular nationalist party
opposed to the authoritarianism of the shah and to foreign interventionism. The
Iran Party joined Islamist and leftist parties in the National Front,
established in 1949 and led by the democratic reformer Muhammad Musaddiq
(1881–1967). The National Front government of 1951–1953 was overthrown in a
military coup supported by the United States and Great Britain, thus restoring
effective authority to the shah.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrahamian, Ervand. Iran Between Two
Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Diekhoff, Alain.
Invention of a Nation: Zionist Thought and the Making of Modern Israel. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Khalidi, Rashid, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad
Muslih, and Reeva S. Simon, eds. The Origins of Arab Nationalism. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991. Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian Identity: The
Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997. Khoury, Philip S. Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of
Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002. Massad, Joseph A. Colonial Effects: The Making of
National Identity in Jordan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Salibi,
Kamal. A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988 Simon, Reeva S. Iraq Between the Two World
Wars: The Militarist Origins of Tyranny, updated edition. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004.

About Me

Mitch Williamson is a technical writer with an
interest in military and naval affairs. He has published articles in
Cross & Cockade International and Wartime magazines. He was
research associate for the Bio-history Cross in the Sky, a book about
Charles 'Moth' Eaton's career, in collaboration with the flier's son,
Dr Charles S. Eaton. He also assisted in picture research for John
Burton's Fortnight of Infamy.
Mitch is now publishing on the WWW various specialist websites combined
with custom website design work.